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Prompt
Engineering

Context
Engineering

By SHAILESH SHAKYA @BEGINNERSBLOG.ORG

Prompt Engineering is the art and
science of crafting precise
instructions to get desired AI
outputs. Think of it as
"programming with words" for a
probabilistic machine.

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1.1. Core Principles:
● Be Crystal Clear & Specific: Use action verbs. Define length, format,
style, and audience. Avoid vague terms.
○ Bad: "Write about AI."
○ Good: "Explain the main differences between supervised and
unsupervised learning in AI for a non-technical audience, in 3 bullet
points."

● Provide Essential Context: Give relevant facts or background. Treat the

AI like a brilliant, but uninformed, new team member.
○ Example: "Given that global temperatures have risen by 1 degree
Celsius since the pre-industrial era, discuss the potential consequences for
sea level rise."

● Show, Don't Just Tell (Examples): Provide input-output examples to

define desired formats or styles. This is incredibly powerful.
○ Example: "Extract entities. Format: Company names: , People names: .
Text: {text}"

● Iterate Relentlessly: Your first prompt won't be perfect. Test, observe,

refine. It's a continuous loop.

● Frame Positively: Tell the AI "what to do," not "what not to do."
○ Bad: "Don't use passive voice."
○ Good: "Use active voice."
● Be Concise: Get to the point. Avoid unnecessary words, but don't
sacrifice clarity.

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1.2. Fundamental Prompt Types:
Choose the right mode based on task complexity and how much
guidance the AI needs.

● Zero-shot Prompting:
○ Concept: Give the AI a task it hasn't seen before, with no examples.
It relies purely on its vast pre-trained knowledge to infer a response.
○ Simple, straightforward tasks where the AI's general knowledge is
sufficient.
○ Example:
■ Prompt: "Translate 'Hello, how are you?' to French."
■ AI Output: "Bonjour, comment allez-vous?"
● One-shot Prompting:
○ Concept: Provide one example of the desired input-output format
directly in the prompt. The AI learns from this single instance.
○ When to Use: When you need a specific format or a simple
classification, and one clear example is enough.
○ Example (Sentiment Analysis):
■ Prompt:
Review: "This movie was fantastic! I loved every minute."
Sentiment: Positive

Review: "The customer service was terrible."

Sentiment:
■ AI Output: "Negative"

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● Few-shot Prompting (In-context Learning):
○ Concept: Include a small number of input-output examples in
the prompt. This guides the AI on desired output structure, tone,
and style, allowing it to generalize from limited data.
○ When to Use: Complex content generation, technical domains,
or when specific output requirements are crucial, and you don't
have enough data for full fine-tuning.
○ Example (JSON Extraction):
■ Prompt:
Text: "John Doe, 30, works at Acme Corp as a Software
Engineer."
JSON: {"name": "John Doe", "age": 30, "company": "Acme
Corp", "title": "Software Engineer"}

Text: "Jane Smith, 25, is a Marketing Specialist at Global

Innovations."
JSON: {"name": "Jane Smith", "age": 25, "company": "Global
Innovations", "title": "Marketing Specialist"}

Text: "Alice Brown, 35, is a Data Scientist at Tech Solutions Inc."

JSON:
■ AI Output: {"name": "Alice Brown", "age": 35, "company":
"Tech Solutions Inc.", "title": "Data Scientist"}
○ Caution: Be aware of potential biases (e.g., majority label
bias, recency bias) if examples are skewed or ordered poorly.

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1.3. Advanced Prompting Techniques:
These techniques push LLMs beyond basic responses,
enhancing reasoning and control.

● Role-Playing / Persona Prompting:

○ Concept: Assign a specific role or persona (e.g.,
"senior legal analyst," "fantasy author") to the AI. This
influences its style, tone, focus, and depth of
information.
○ Why it Works: The AI taps into its vast training
data to mimic communication patterns and domain
knowledge associated with that role.

○ Example:
■ Prompt: "You are a university professor
specializing in machine learning. Explain the concept
of neural networks to first-year students."

■ AI Output: (Will explain in an academic,

structured, yet accessible way, like a professor.)

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● Chain-of-Thought (CoT):
○ Concept: Guide the AI to show its
intermediate reasoning steps before giving
the final answer.
○ Improves logical reasoning, mathematical
computations, and transparency, especially
for complex tasks. It makes the AI "think
aloud."

○ Example:
■ Prompt: "A store has 12 apples. It sells 5,
then buys 3 more. How many apples are
left? Let's think step by step."
■ AI Output: "First, the store had 12
apples. It sold 5, so 12 - 5 = 7 apples.
Then, it bought 3 more, so 7 + 3 = 10
apples. The answer is 10."

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● Tree-of-Thought (ToT):
○ Concept: An advanced CoT. The AI explores
multiple distinct reasoning paths, self-evaluates
choices, and can backtrack.
○ Enables deliberate decision-making and
planning for tasks requiring non-trivial search or
creativity (e.g., complex puzzles, creative
writing).

● Self-Consistency:
○ Concept: The AI samples a diverse set of
reasoning paths for a problem and then selects
the most frequent answer among them (majority
vote).
○ Improves reliability and robustness by
aggregating multiple "guesses," leveraging the
AI's ability to judge its own outputs.

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● Least-to-Most (LtM):
○ Concept: Breaks down complex problems
into simpler subproblems and solves them
sequentially, explicitly using the output of each
subproblem as input for the next.
○ Addresses AI's "working memory" limitations
by managing intermediate states, allowing it to
generalize to much longer reasoning chains.

● Generated Knowledge:
○ Concept: The AI first generates relevant
knowledge itself about the task, then uses that
generated knowledge as additional context to
formulate the final answer.

Enhances contextual understanding and

accuracy by self-augmenting its knowledge,
reducing misinterpretation.

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1.4. Structuring & Automating Prompts
● Prompt Chaining:
○ Concept: Link multiple prompts in a logical
sequence, where the output of one becomes the
input for the next.
○ Breaks down complex tasks into manageable
subtasks, improving control, reliability, and
consistency in workflows.

○ Example: Prompt 1: "Summarize this document."

-> Output 1. Prompt 2: "Rephrase the summary from
Output 1 for a marketing email." -> Output 2.

● Prompt Templating:
○ Concept: Standardize instructions and input
formats using placeholders (variables).
○ Ensures consistency, clarity, efficiency, and
reusability across tasks or teams. Think of it like
code libraries for prompts.
Tool: LangChain's PromptTemplate allows easy
creation and management of templates.

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1.5. Practical Applications
● Summarizing: Condense long texts.
○ Types: Extractive (selects original sentences) vs.
Abstractive (generates new sentences).
○ Tip: Be specific about length and focus.
● Rewriting: Adjust style, tone, or length.
○ Action: "Rewrite this paragraph in a formal tone."
○ Tip: Provide your own writing samples for style
mimicry.

● Generating Agent Instructions: Define the AI's role,

personality, planning, memory, and tool usage for
complex tasks.
○ Example: "You are a helpful code assistant that can
teach a junior developer how to code. Your language
of choice is Python. Don't explain the code, just
generate the code block itself."

● Code Generation: Generate code from comments,

complete functions, or create database queries.
○ Tip: Provide clear requirements and examples.

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When using LLM APIs (OpenAI, Google AI
Studio, Anthropic, Hugging Face), these
parameters control output behavior.

● temperature: Controls creativity/randomness.

Lower (e.g., 0.2) for factual, higher (e.g., 0.8)
for creative.
● top_p: Similar to temperature, controls
determinism. Lower for exact answers, higher for
diverse responses.
● max_tokens / max_length: Sets the maximum
length of the AI's response, controlling cost and
verbosity.
● stop sequences: Strings that tell the AI to stop
generating (e.g., "11." to limit a list to 10 items).

frequency penalty / presence penalty: Reduce

word/phrase repetition

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Part 2: Context Engineering
Context Engineering is the strategic design
of the entire information environment an AI
model perceives before generating a
response. It's about building a "mental
world" for the AI, not just giving it a single
instruction.

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2.1. The Big Picture: LLM as CPU,
Context as RAM

● Analogy: LLM is like a CPU of an AI system,

and its context window is the RAM.

○ Prompt Engineering: What you tell the CPU to

do right now (a single instruction).

○ Context Engineering: How you manage all the

data in the RAM (context window) so the CPU has
everything it needs to perform any task,
consistently, over time.

● A brilliant prompt is useless if the AI's "RAM" is

filled with irrelevant data or lacks crucial
information. Context Engineering ensures the AI
always has the right "knowledge" at its fingertips.

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 2.2. Context Engineering vs. Prompt
Engineering:
A Clear Distinction Prompt Engineering is a subset of Context
Engineering.

Aspect Prompt Engineering Context Engineering

Designing the entire

Crafting the perfect single information environment
Focus
instruction ("What to say"). ("What the AI knows, and
why it cares").
Broad: Memory, history,
Scope Narrow: Immediate input prompt. tools, system prompts,
external data.
Creative writing, linguistic Systems design, information
Mindset
optimization. architecture.
Built for scale; handles
Hard to scale; needs manual
Scalability complex, long-running
tweaks for variations.
workflows.
Inspecting full context
Debugging Rewording prompts, guessing. window, memory, data
flow.
Architectural thinking, data
Effort Type Linguistic creativity.
management.

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2.3. Context Window Management
Strategies
LLMs have a finite "working memory" (context window)
measured in tokens. Exceeding it degrades performance.

● The Problem: Large context windows can introduce noise,

increase cost, and hide crucial "needles in a haystack."

● Strategies:
○ Chunking & Summarization: Break large texts into smaller,
manageable segments (chunks). Summarize accumulated
information to preserve details and remove redundancy.
○ Sliding Window Technique: Process text in overlapping
segments, focusing attention on a fixed-size window.
Reduces computational complexity while maintaining context
continuity.
○ Filtering Irrelevant Information: Actively remove
unnecessary details or "noise" before they reach the model.
○ Dynamic Contextualization: Adjust context window size
and content based on the specific query.

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2.4. Memory Mechanisms: Short-term vs.
Long-term

To maintain coherent interactions, AI systems need different types of

memory.

● Short-Term Memory (STM):

○ Concept: The immediate context window of the LLM. It's ephemeral;
information disappears once the response is generated.
○ Purpose: Holds information relevant to the current API request or
conversation turn. Crucial for real-time tasks.
○ Limitation: Limited capacity (around 5-9 pieces of info), leading to
context loss if not managed.

● Long-Term Memory (LTM):

○ Concept: External systems designed to store data beyond a single
chat session, allowing the AI to "remember" details, user preferences,
or vast document repositories over extended periods.
○ Mechanisms: Often uses external vector databases and graph
databases to store information in numerical formats that capture
relationships.
○ Benefits: Enables context-rich responses, significantly reduces
hallucinations (via RAG), and facilitates efficient data handling. It's
key for "lifelong learning" in AI.

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Part 3: Building Robust AI Systems
with Context Engineering (RAG)
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a
cornerstone for building knowledgeable and
reliable LLM applications, overcoming their static
knowledge and tendency to "hallucinate."

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3.1. RAG Workflow:

RAG dynamically fetches external information to enhance the LLM's

output with up-to-date, verifiable, or domain-specific facts.

1. Indexing (Offline):
○ Action: Load raw data (documents, chat history), preprocess
(chunk into smaller segments), convert to high-dimensional vector
embeddings using an embedding model, and store in a vector
database.
○ Why: Creates a searchable knowledge base.

2. Retrieval (Runtime):
○ Action: User query is converted into a vector embedding. A
similarity search finds the most semantically relevant
documents/chunks from the vector database.
○ Why: Finds the "needle in the haystack" – the most relevant
information for the query.

3. Generation:
○ Action: The retrieved relevant documents are combined with the
original user prompt. This augmented input is fed to the LLM.
Why: Ensures the AI's response is accurate, context-aware, and
grounded in real data, mitigating hallucinations.

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3.2. Key Components: Embeddings &
Vector Databases

● Embeddings:
○ Concept: Numerical representations of text
(words, sentences, documents) in a high-
dimensional space. They capture semantic
meaning and relationships.
○ Why: Allow for "semantic search" – finding
information based on meaning, not just
keywords.

● Vector Databases:
○ Concept: Specialized databases designed to
store embeddings and facilitate rapid similarity
searches.
○ Examples: Pinecone, Weaviate, Milvus,
Qdrant. Traditional databases like Redis,
pgvector, Elasticsearch also offer vector support.

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3.3. Indexing & Retrieval
Strategies
Crucial for efficient and accurate information
retrieval in RAG.
● Chunking Strategies: How large documents
are split (e.g., fixed-length, sentence-level,
recursive, content-aware).
● Indexing Mechanisms: How vectors are
organized for fast search (e.g., HNSW, IVF, PQ,
LSH).

● Retrieval Methods:
○ Hybrid Search: Combines keyword and
semantic search.
○ Recursive Retrieval: Starts with small chunks,
then retrieves larger ones for richer context.
○ Sub-Queries: Breaks complex user queries
into smaller questions for different data sources.

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3.4. Integrating with LLM
Frameworks
Frameworks simplify building RAG
pipelines, abstracting complexity.

● LangChain: Provides PromptTemplate

options and facilitates prompt chaining.

● LlamaIndex: Powerful open-source

framework specifically for RAG,
simplifying chunking, embedding,
indexing, and querying. Offers "recipes"
for optimization.

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Part 4: Evaluating, Debugging &
Optimizing LLM Outputs
Essential for ensuring reliable and high-quality AI
systems.

4.1. LLM Evaluation Metrics

Assess output quality across correctness,
relevance, and efficiency.
● Quantitative: Accuracy, Precision, Recall, F1-
Score (classification); BLEU, ROUGE (text
generation); Perplexity.
● LLM-as-a-Judge: Use one LLM to evaluate
another's output based on natural language
rubrics (e.g., G-Eval). Often more accurate for
semantic nuance.
● RAG-Specific: Retrieval Accuracy, Relevance
Score, Response Coherence, Factual Consistency,
Robustness to Noise, Negative Rejection,
Information Integration.

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4.2. Common Failure Modes:
Understanding these helps you build resilient
AI.

● Prompt Engineering Failures: Vague

prompts, prompt overload, ambiguous
language, missing context, lack of iteration,
blind trust in AI output, forgetting
role/audience, biases.

● RAG System Failures: Extraction errors (AI

misreads retrieved info), context size limitations
(info too long), inexhaustive computation (AI
responds too early), missing content (info not in
database), missed top-ranked (relevant info not
retrieved), wrong format/specificity, answer
not extracted (AI fails to find answer in
provided context).

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4.3. Debugging & Iterative Prompt
Design

A systematic process for optimizing

performance.

1. Spot Problems: Identify hallucinations,

unclear instructions, token limit issues.
2. Test Each Part: Verify input data, context
clarity. Start simple, add complexity.
3. Use Tools: Visualize attention maps, analyze
token probabilities, use tracking software
(LangSmith, PromptLayer).
4. Iterate & Improve: Track prompt versions, test
variations, incorporate user feedback.
5. Final Testing: Measure performance with
metrics, test real-world scenarios, human
review.

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4.4. A/B Testing for Prompt
Optimization

● Concept: Systematically compare

different prompt versions to see which
performs better.
● Essential for continuous evaluation,
enhancing performance, reducing
bias, accelerating innovation, and
data-driven decision-making.
● Action: Integrate A/B testing into
continuous deployment workflows.

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Part 5: Ethical Considerations
& Responsible AI Practices
Crucial for safe, fair, and transparent LLM
deployment.

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5.1. Bias in LLM Outputs &
Mitigation
● Types: Demographic, language/cultural,
temporal, stereotypical association. Often
reflect training data flaws.

● Mitigation:
○ Prompt Design: Use clear, neutral
prompts; include diverse examples; explicitly
instruct AI to avoid stereotypes.
○ Advanced: Reinforcement Learning from
Human Feedback (RLHF), adversarial
prompting, context isolation.

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5.2. Hallucinations & Ethical
Implications
● Definition: AI generates factually incorrect,
inconsistent, or made-up text, despite sounding
plausible. Not human error; stems from statistical
pattern prediction.
● Causes: Errors in encoding/decoding, data
outliers, model prioritizing fluency over factual
accuracy.
● Implications: Undermines reliability/trust, spreads
misinformation, amplifies bias, privacy risks,
reputational/financial damage, safety concerns
(e.g., in healthcare).
● Mitigation: RAG (grounding in verifiable facts),
robust evaluation, continuous monitoring, guardrails
(detect and filter unsafe outputs).

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5.3. Responsible AI Practices &
Governance
Ensuring safe, secure, fair, and ethical use of
LLMs.

● Key Aspects:
○ Fairness: Objective systems, no discrimination.
○ Accountability & Human Oversight: Clear roles,
human intervention for high-risk applications.
○ Privacy & Data Security: Encryption,
anonymization, access controls. Compliance with
laws (HIPAA, CCPA).
○ Security: Protect from unauthorized
access/abuse (adversarial attacks). Use input
firewalls, output validators.
○ Transparency: Be clear about AI capabilities,
limitations, decision-making.
○ Continuous Monitoring: Regular assessment for
fairness, accuracy, compliance.

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Part 6: Future Trends
The AI field evolves rapidly. Stay ahead.

● Anticipated LLM Advancements:

○ Enhanced contextual understanding (e.g., GPT-4o).
○ Multimodal AI (processing text, images, audio, video).
○ Adaptive prompting (AI adjusts to user style).
○ Increased reliability and efficiency (less hallucinations, faster,
cheaper).

● Emerging Prompt/Context Trends:

○ AI for Prompt Creation: Generative AI creating and optimizing
prompts.
○ "Mega-Prompts": Using much larger context windows (e.g.,
Gemini 1.5 Pro's 1M tokens).
○ Automated Prompt Optimization: ML algorithms (RL, Bayesian
optimization) to find best prompts.
○ Context Engineering as Primary Skill: Shift from single prompts
to managing the entire AI information ecosystem.
○ Human-AI Collaboration: AI as a brainstorming partner,
refining drafts.
○ No-code Platforms: Empowering non-technical users to create
prompts.
○ Ethical Prompting: Continued focus on fairness, transparency,
bias mitigation.

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● Learning:
○ Stay Updated: Read academic papers (NeurIPS, ACL,
EMNLP, arXiv).
○ Engage Communities: Participate in forums (e.g.,
Reddit's r/PromptEngineering).
○ Online Courses: Enroll in specialized courses
(Coursera, Udemy, edX from Google, IBM, Vanderbilt,
DeepLearning.AI).
○ Hands-on: Experiment with playgrounds and APIs
(OpenAI, Google AI Studio).
○ Frameworks: Master LangChain, LlamaIndex.
○ Engineering Discipline: Apply version control for
prompts, A/B testing, robust evaluation.
Problem Formulation: Focus on clearly defining the
problem's scope, not just prompt phrasing

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